Chapter 5 - Sea-Watch

Summary

This chapter turns to a second pro-migration activist intervention, the Sea-Watch initiative, which is a German-based association operating search and rescue in the central Mediterranean between Libya and Italy/Malta. By situating the intervention in relation to existing mechanisms of rescue charted in Part I of the book, the chapter shows how Sea-Watch is important in challenging biopolitical, thanatopolitical and zoopolitical dynamics of governing migration through death and vulnerability, in which rescue itself serves as a condition of ultra-precarity. Drawing on research carried out in Lampedusa and Malta, it highlights how Sea-Watch invokes dignity in the midst of danger by undertaking rescue operations at sea in terms that both respect the unruly forces of the sea, while also engaging people on the move as guests who are worthy of respect. Yet it also shows how the intervention is characterised by various ambiguities, which reflect both contestations over conceptions of the sea and a seafaring tradition, as well as the difficulties of escaping transactions with businesses that benefit from the production of death and vulnerability. Despite this, the chapter argues that Sea-Watch remains critical in its enactment of a politics of witness in a context marked by a failure to protect life at sea. Playing an important role in raising awareness of the situation in the central Mediterranean as well as in coordinating sea rescues and monitoring rights violations directly, Sea-Watch’s efforts to operate in solidarity with people on the move enacts a response to the so-called crisis that is orientated towards more hopeful political horizons. It is precisely because of this, the chapter concludes, that organisations such as Sea-Watch have faced increasing difficulties over time in undertaking search and rescue operations.